Recycle That Headquarters

Two recent dispatches from the frontiers of office design: a drone video of the vast circular excavations for Apple’s new Cupertino headquarters, and the news that Weyerhaeuser, the tree- and forest-products company, was selling its own earthwork-like 1971 building to move to Pioneer Square, in downtown Seattle. These projects have more in common—for better and for worse—than you might think. Weyerhaeuser (shrinking) is giving up the suburbs of Federal Way, Washington, for the dream of urban connection, even as growing companies drape themselves in vines to make their out-of-town locations seem like the earth-friendly choice.

When Weyerhaeuser’s three-hundred-and-fifty-four-thousand-square-foot complex was new, it was simultaneously the last word in the suburban corporate estates that flourished during the postwar era (Eero Saarinen’s General Motors Technical Center, outside Detroit, was among the earliest) and the first word in environmental consciousness as company branding. Weyerhaeuser’s architect, Edward Charles Bassett, of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s San Francisco office, said of the design, “I wanted to find a point where the landscaping and the building simply could not be separated, that they were each a creature of the other and so dependent that they could hardly have survived alone.” The long, low building acts as a dam for a ten-acre artificial lake, with a wildflower meadow on one side and water on the other. (The landscape was designed by Sasaki, Walker and Associates.) The façade looks as much like foliage as structure, with stripes of concrete panels alternating with long, recessed windows and ivy-covered terraces.

Inside, the horizontal proportion was maintained with no full-height partitions between offices, a relatively newfangled idea of organization known as bürolandschaft, or office landscape. Workers were arranged in groups by task, rather than in assembly-line-like rows, and management was out on the floor rather than in closed-door offices. For Weyerhaeuser, designers at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Knoll ran with the nature theme, with panelling in teak-finished white oak, made (of course) at a Weyerhaeuser plant, and work floors loosely divided by a thousand growing plants. The company Web site also trumpets the building’s more technical energy-conservation features. In the press release announcing the move, the president and C.E.O., Doyle R. Simons, said, “This campus has served us well,” but “moving to Seattle is an important step forward.”

Apple’s building, designed by Foster + Partners, has also been presented with a healthy amount of environmental rhetoric, including Steve Jobs’s childhood memories of apricot orchards. Tim Cook, the C.E.O., told the Climate Week NYC conference that it would be “the greenest building on the planet.” Apple’s round, low building is supposed to melt into a newly planted orchard, camouflaged by its own transparency. In both cases, the headquarters sites had previous industrial uses: the construction is presented as a pastoral restoration (a very West Coast “healing” process), despite the amount of energy expended in the production of each new Eden. The drone video, in particular, highlights the vast underground parking garage that Apple requires to preserve the illusion of nature on the site. Parking lots have always proved problematic for suburban office campuses, though Bassett came up with one of the best solutions, for Weyerhaeuser. The University of Washington landscape historian Thaisa Way referred to Weyerhaeuser’s terraced and shaded lots as “the most beautiful parking lot ever.”

Facebook’s new Frank Gehry campus participates in the same corporate environmental rhetoric. While Apple will look green from the ground, Facebook’s environmentalism is worn on its roof, where surface-level parking and warehouse-like open-plan offices are topped with a roof deep enough to support full-size trees, cafés, and work benches. Bassett’s description of Weyerhaeuser’s decision to go with its non-hierarchical, flexible plan could easily be put on a press release for any number of companies today. “The relationships between people who are working together as teams on projects or have similar kinds of duties are much more immediate,” he told an interviewer in 1989. “There appears to be an easier, more comfortable relationship between fellow workers and a commensurate increase in efficiency, especially communication.” George Weyerhaeuser was out on the floor with everyone else (like Michael Bloomberg in his fishbowl mayor’s office), albeit with a slightly larger and fancier work station.

What the new campuses lack, and the 1971 version aspired to, was communication with the outside world: Weyerhaeuser’s grounds, including a botanical garden, were open to the public, along with trails for hiking and running. The pastoralism was not for badge-wearing employees alone, and the symbolism could be experienced with your own eyes, not just via drone. All Cupertino residents will see of Apple’s orchard is a thickened edge; Facebook’s green roofs in Menlo Park might be glimpsed from the highway that separates the new campus from its current one. (There will be a tunnel for employees.)

Commentators were quick to suggest that Weyerhaeuser’s urban move was the choice of the future, as the suburban one had been in the early seventies. That company’s new, smaller, blander office building has the potential to reawaken Pioneer Square, and follows the lead of Seattle’s own Amazon. Amazon, in fact, is now building a trio of “plant-rich” biodomes downtown—for employees only, unlike the public, tree-filled atrium at the Ford Foundation, in Manhattan (completed 1968). Locating offices near housing, shopping, and public transportation, as in downtown business districts, is considered a priority for attracting younger workers, and is, in most cases, the greener choice. Simons said, in the same statement, that the move would give the company “access to a larger talent pool.”

But the Weyerhaeuser headquarters seem purpose-built, rhetorically and materially, for one of Seattle’s growing companies. As Way noted to the Seattle Times, its brawny, low-lying aesthetic is still the dominant one for Pacific Northwest Modern. If you weren’t told that the building was from 1971, would you know? It’s amazing to me how well this headquarters has worn, unlike some of its glassier and boxier East Coast counterparts. Residential communities have grown up nearby, and the thinking behind Weyerhaeuser’s original site choice—equidistant from Seattle and Tacoma, near the airport—remains appealing to many. Rather than embarking on a massive, top-secret earthwork to recreate a childhood memory, or trumpeting an open plan that is hardly revolutionary, Facebook, Apple, or even a local university could use Weyerhaeuser’s historic building to test a more interesting and less heroic theory: that adaptive reuse can be the most environmental choice of all—even in the suburbs.